An Ancestor, an Assassin

Through the 1960s and 70s, the aye-aye was considered the rarest lemur on Madagascar. It was never actually that scarce, only that scarce to find: a nocturnal animal spread across both the humid eastern forests and the dry deciduous forests of the west, it simply avoided being seen. The sole living member of its own family, Daubentoniidae, it uses one impossibly thin, elongated middle finger to tap on dead wood, listening for hollow chambers, then fishes out the grubs hidden inside.

Not the rarest lemur. Just the one nobody wanted to look for.

That single finger, doing a woodpecker’s job on an island that has no woodpeckers, is the physical fact everyone eventually mentions. What gets mentioned far less is what that same finger has come to mean in the villages the aye-aye actually lives beside.

Across wide stretches of Madagascar, the aye-aye is read as a présage de malheur, a sign of misfortune, illness, and death, a belief severe enough that it is often killed on sight rather than tolerated. In the Manongarivo region, the response can go further still: simply seeing an aye-aye has been enough reason for an entire village to abandon its site, rather than risk the disaster its presence is believed to foretell.

The irony sharpens at Ankarana, one of the densest primate habitats on Earth, where up to 500 lemurs can be found per square kilometre. The local Antankarana observe a fady that forbids killing any lemur there, a taboo credited with making the park’s lemurs remarkably unafraid of people. The aye-aye is the single, explicit exception. Every other lemur in that forest is protected by belief. This one is excluded from it.

Among the Sakalava of western Madagascar, the fear takes a specific and gruesome shape: the belief that an aye-aye can enter a house at night and kill the sleeping occupants by slicing their aortic artery with its thin fingers. Anyone who encounters the animal is expected to kill it on the spot, before it has the chance to do the same to them.

A curse left at the crossroads, for any stranger passing through.

In parts of the northwest and northeast, the response to a killed aye-aye becomes a piece of folk engineering in its own right: the body, or sometimes just the tail, is displayed at the edge of a road or at a crossroads, so that the misfortune it carries passes onto whichever stranger happens by next, rather than staying with the people who killed it.

In 1966, nine aye-ayes were introduced to Nosy Mangabe, a reserve island free of the persecution that follows the species on the mainland, and the population there has grown steadily ever since. It is one of the clearer conservation successes built directly around sidestepping belief rather than trying to argue against it.

The animal’s other real conflict with people is more mundane: aye-ayes raid coconut and litchi plantations near Mananara, and are killed there simply as agricultural pests, no supernatural reasoning required. Between habitat loss, targeted killing, and crop-defense retaliation, the IUCN lists the aye-aye as Endangered, with a population estimated between 1,000 and 10,000 individuals spread across at least 16 protected areas. Rare in reputation for half a century, and now, in a different sense, actually becoming so.